


so drunk on you

by endquestionmark



Category: Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 21:54:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3994267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Owen doesn’t dream like a human any more. He used to, very briefly, dream in languages that he could articulate, and concepts that he could explain: jealousy, fear, elation, all these things which he now realizes are inseparable from being human. Owen knows that because he dreams, now, in shades of hunger, and appetites, all primal and beyond verbalization, even when he sleeps in his bed, on the worn-in futon that smells entirely of human, no sweet dry grass here, nor the humidity of raptor breath. In his sleep, Owen is always hungry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	so drunk on you

**Author's Note:**

> Where do I even fucking start. Fuck [these three trees](http://memestorage.com/_nw/67/59828294.jpg) in particular: [Nell](http://cthonical.tumblr.com/), [Rachel](http://archiveofourown.org/users/soaringrachel), and [Cat](http://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit). I have to clarify that Owen does not literally fuck a raptor or get vivisected here, but the fact that I have to issue that warning at all is a pretty strong indication of what to expect.
> 
> ETA: I did not in fact know that Delta existed when I wrote this, which is what you get for writing trailerfic. If you're tempted to leave a comment pointing this out, congratulations! I already know. Don't.

Owen doesn’t dream like a human any more. He used to, very briefly, dream in languages that he could articulate, and concepts that he could explain: jealousy, fear, elation, all these things which he now realizes are inseparable from being human. With Blue, and Echo, and Charlie, when he spends a night in the barn with them, he can pick them out by their markings, true, but also by the way they sleep. Blue is in the center of their pack huddle, bracketed by Echo and Charlie, and she curls up, sacrificing range of motion for security and warmth and the protection of her peers. Charlie isn’t quite as incautious, and Echo is even more guarded, easy to wake at any point in the night. Predator instincts, Owen knows, are a hell of a thing to dial down, even here, where they’ve never been tested against anything more dangerous than, once, a particularly vacant cow, which they had stripped to the bone in a matter of seconds. Owen’s taken down feral cheeseburgers with more effort.

Dreaming is something that he knows his pack does, because they, like dogs, twitch with it, claws skittering through the dried grass; he imagines, if he got close enough, that he could watch their eyes moving behind their lids, thin skin opaque in the dim moonlight. Blue snuffles in her sleep, breath hissing between her teeth, and Charlie’s hind legs twitch. Maybe she’s hunting, across the plains enclosure which they keep for the smarter girls; maybe she’s dreaming of running with a bigger pack, cutting a swathe through tall grass, or digging her claws in, gaining leverage for the kill. Echo’s always a difficult one — Owen thinks that, if any one of them is going to take a swipe at him, it’ll be her — but even she becomes less indecipherable in sleep, tail switching back and forth, and that means she’s excited, or perhaps irritable, though the two tend to run together.

Owen knows that because he dreams, now, in shades of hunger, and appetites, all primal and beyond verbalization, even when he sleeps in his bed, on the worn-in futon that smells entirely of human, no sweet dry grass here, nor the humidity of raptor breath. He closes his eyes and reopens them in mottled darkness, leaf-shadows shifting around him, and the horizon is indistinct and endless. The leaf litter is soft beneath his bare feet, and he never has to catch his breath or pause to nurse a stitch in his side. The world is absolutely alive with impulse, from the smallest flicker of movement to the far-off cough of — he isn’t sure what, but it’s wounded, weak and easy to drag to the ground, and something to play with, and it’s — prey, which is all that matters, really. In his sleep, Owen is always hungry, though not always for the flesh implied by his voracity. Sometimes it’s enough to run and run, endless through the purest iteration of the forest. Sometimes what he really wants is to fight, pulling no punches, until his muscles are screaming with overexertion and his head is light, claws out and no holds barred. Sometimes, yes, it’s for the hot coppery stink of blood, and warm, wet meat, slippery and almost obscene in its lushness.

Sometimes, like today, he wakes up tangled in his sheets, heat burning through him as if he’s running a fever, skin on cotton, heartbeat an urgent thrum, and he’s so hard that it hurts. This doesn’t happen often — at least, not often enough for him to be worried about, and not often enough for him to let it get him killed — but it does make being a person, again, after hours of _not_ , a little easier, to slip back into this shape and these rules and this mind, and to be slightly less jarred by it. This, after all, is just another type of hunger: it hits Owen just as hard in the gut, is just as inexorable and impossible to ignore. Instead, Owen breathes into it until he feels the pull in his ribcage, the ache in his shoulders from a day of heavy lifting — tug-of-war with the pack, over a goat leg, for play; some work on his bike, which will make Echo at least hiss when she smells it on him; a minor incident with a downed tree on an enclosed trail — and a night of restless sleep, judging from the pillow shoved half-off the head of the bed and the sheets wrapped around his legs.

This isn’t unusual; Owen works on an island full of tourists, who are paying an exorbitant amount of money to experience dinosaurs in conjunction with resort-level accommodations, and it’s not like he has a lot of opportunities to — _consult —_ on the finer points of life, not when there are twenty thousand lives relying on his expertise and ability to predict predator behavior every day. It’s not like he’s prone to prettying himself up for the guests, either. Someone has to be willing to put up with severe abrasions and blisters and the endless, endless mud, and Owen doesn’t see any point in pretending to be anything else than what he is.

Masrani wanted a handler, and Owen’s never known one who didn’t pick up a little too much from their pack. Big cats, attack dogs, killer whales: it makes no difference. Nobody gets as far as he has — not without losing a hand, or half their liver, or something else that they probably consider important — without realizing that it’s not a straightforward hierarchy when it comes to predators. Owen isn’t a raptor, for all that he dreams like one, and he never will be: he’s not the alpha, no matter what he says to make guests go wide-eyed and, more importantly, to make them stop giving him shit. He doesn’t fit into the pack, not really, except as, ultimately, prey. He’s a strange raw-underbelly outsider who occasionally makes suggestions that have merit, and his pack deigns not to eat him for the moment. He’s living on borrowed time, and as long as he doesn’t look down, then he won’t fall, and he can keep dancing just ahead of their claws and teeth.

Now, face pressed hard into the sheets, that’s a giddying thought, especially with the roar of the hunt still in his ears and stringing all his muscles out tight, pulling at bruises and strains that he’d forgotten until now. Owen thinks of Blue — the beta, no lie there, but no less beautiful in motion, with blood smeared across her muzzle and her eyes uncannily locked on her prize, unblinking and wide — and of the last practice run they did, him on his bike, the only reason that he can keep up with any of them. They had started an hour after sunset, sea breeze dying down for the night and the last of the day’s heat leaching out of the supply road, and done a perimeter of the herbivore enclosures. By the end of it — three hours’ ride — he’d paced them to wear themselves out, but at the very beginning, they had been snapping at each other’s tails, and striking at shadows, darting back and skittering about in the undergrowth, rustling only barely distinguishable from the sounds of the forest settling into the night.

It hadn’t been quiet, but it hadn’t been anything close to the tumultuous sound in Owen’s dreams, not with the roar of his bike’s engine overlaid on the last of the diurnal birds and the endlessly renewing population of scavengers chirruping from the trees. It had been a rush, though, straight to his head, like a shot of really good or really dirty tequila, or the way Claire looks at him, sometimes, absolutely disdainful and yet oddly transfixed. Owen imagines that it must be the way Charlie feels when she gets her claws into something’s ribcage, and from there it’s only a matter of torsion, and time, and whether she feels like having fun before she feeds. He had paced them, gunning the engine until he was leading the pack, and any of them could have coiled for a spring and brought him down, teeth buried in the nape of his neck or his shoulder, and Owen would never have had a chance. His relationship with the pack is built on mutual respect, though that’s too strong — too _human_ — a word for the acknowledgment of fellow hunters.

Echo had scratched him once, back when he was first training her to _hold_ — one hand in a fist, the other held out — and she had feinted at him, and scraped her teeth across his open palm. It had bled the way hand wounds always do, which is to say profusely and briefly, and then knitted together over the course of an itchy, irritating week of gloves. Echo had been more surprised than Owen, then, whether at her own audacity or at the taste of his blood. That’s something, too, that she hasn’t come back for more. One day, Owen thinks — and it’s a thought that fills his world up all by itself — this rapport, this uneasy truce that they have, is going to fall through, and he isn’t going to be able to run fast enough, or hide well enough, or fight hard enough. That’s a simple fact. He isn’t designed to be a predator the way that they are. He’s made himself into one as best he can, instincts carved into muscle memory over the course of long hours, but they aren’t human, and he is, and one day that will be enough.

They’re beautiful, though, in action or at rest, oddly feline in their affectations. If he doesn’t get out before they go for his throat, Owen thinks that he could make peace with that, and if he does, it’ll only be a matter of time before he finds himself another tiger trap to throw himself into. He can imagine it — the hunt — from their side as well as his own, and he gasps, because it feels so natural, and inevitable, almost a match between equals. He pushes down against the sheets, hips rolling, and digs his fingers into the futon for leverage, and wonders what it would be like, to run for his life, and to know that it won’t be enough.

He would keep running, probably, through the forest, on foot or bike, and they wouldn’t — he groans, because the friction is so good against his sleep-warm skin, and the ache in his shoulders so indulgent — they wouldn’t pace themselves, this time, but push themselves, because he’s the kill they’ve stalked the longest, learning him as he’s learned them. Echo would be in the lead, and then Charlie and Blue, matching each other’s speed, and they would bark at each other, that hoarse rasping that he can’t quite imitate, but that he thinks of as the laughter of those who can afford to play with their prey. That playfulness is what keeps him coming back, keeps him finding more and more dangerous packs, and it has him digging his fingers into his own thigh, now, breath coming hard as he thinks about Echo, finally, and the way she always leaps, fluid and unspeakably gorgeous, for first blood.

In her case, it would be second blood, but Owen doubts that it would make much difference. Maybe they would make it quick — tear his throat out, crack his ribcage open before he’d finished bleeding out, and snap at his guts, too hungry to be fastidious; quick is relative — but he doesn’t think so, not when they’ve tolerated him for this long, and God, _God_ , he thinks about the snap of teeth, and his dick twitches, leaking on the sheets, and he makes a throaty noise, unashamed and animal. They would take him out at the joints, first, hamstring him when he pulled himself from the wreck of his bike and tried to run, and then they would shear through the muscles of his rotator cuff, and when he went to his knees, legs unsteady and arms hanging limp and useless, they might go for his wrist flexors, leave his hands bloody and useless, and he lets his hands fall open as he thinks about it.

There are a lot of ways to get hurt and to keep on living, though in this case the living wouldn’t last terribly long, and would only technically qualify as such. The real delicacies that Charlie and Blue enjoy now are the organs, the tender kidneys, red-streaked and warm, though Echo has a fondness for big muscles, like shoulder and thigh meat, and she would let them fight over snapping his ribs back like so much bird bone and snarling though the contents, licking blood from his bones and their claws, perhaps, while she would tug at tough flesh with her teeth, gaze fixed on him the entire time. Owen’s eyes are squeezed closed, and he’s so close — hips jerking, now, and breath coming in uneven gasps — and he’s a mess; he can smell blood in the air from the scrapes on his back that he’s reopened, and the sheets are smeared and filthy, and only getting more so, and he feels feral, snarling into the pillow.

It wouldn’t even hurt, probably. The prey animals that the pack takes down don’t seem to respond as if it does, anyway, not after the first few bites, when they’re laid open, red and glistening, and the pack really starts to work them over. At first, they scream, and struggle, and kick at the air, but they fade so quickly, and then it’s just whimpering, or maybe the wheeze of collapsed lungs. Ribs don’t always break cleanly. Owen’s been in shock, had his whole body go ice-cold and felt the blood drain from his face and his fingers, and his slowing pulse thump in his ears, glacial and dizzying, and this would be just like that. If he got through the first ten minutes, he wouldn’t even have to worry about screaming. He wouldn’t have the breath or energy to — or the blood; there isn’t a lot of blood in a human but splattered across the forest floor, there is more than enough — and at the end, he wouldn’t want to, either, blood loss leaving him woozy and dreaming.

He has a flash, then, of what it would be like for Echo, for Blue and Charlie, consuming the flesh of a long-held and long-loved enemy — though, again, love: not a word that holds much value in a world centered on the hunt — in ultimate homage, perhaps, or to devour his strength for themselves, or, most intoxicating of all, absolutely insignificant. In the end, maybe Owen would just be another kill, another line in their bloody tally, blood bubbling at his mouth and ragged ribcage like obscene art, just another animal, reduced to so much flesh and bone and pain that he wouldn’t know how to express. He scrapes his nails down his thigh, then, breaking the moment, the pretense of helplessness, and the shock is what pushes him over, like claws in his belly, tugging, and he makes an awful noise as he comes, all pained surprise and animal instinct and jolting breath.

As much as Owen tries to keep himself still, to freeze on instinct, he can’t help the way he jerks against the sheets, the reflex of it, and it’s a long minute before he goes absolutely limp, breath slowing bit by bit. He settles back into his own shape, his heartbeat — steady and unstopping — and the sunlight, already warm, even this early, filtering through the curtains, insistent on his back, forcing him back into the morning.

He still aches, but the tension in his back and shoulders is gone, now, and it’s a pleasant soreness, warm and present and _earned_. He’s missed the morning chorus, and the island is coming to life, raucous and wild and irrepressible, even cleaned up for company. The forest is all green and gold in the daylight, even in the shadows, and the hunt has moved to the plains and the rivers, a straightforward chase and kill; no games. Owen has work to do, and a pack to feed, and probably some more bullshit from corporate to field, because even on Isla Nublar, it’s a day that ends in Y, which means that someone who has no idea what they’re doing has definite ideas about what they should be doing, and thinks that lives can be broken down into neat numbers and returns.

Owen stretches, and rolls over, and stares at the dust specks visible by the ceiling, floating gold in the morning light. Borrowed time is borrowed time, and he may as well make the most of it. There will always be more to the night.

 


End file.
